]]>On Thursday Google announced its 13th investment in a clean energy project over a three year period — the clean energy from all of these projects, like solar and wind farms, is enough to power 500,000 (U.S.) homes and Google has put in over $1 billion into these ventures. This time, the project is a large solar panel farm that’s being built in the Imperial County in California, and Google is investing $103 million into it.

When fully constructed the solar panel farm, called Mount Signal Solar, will provide 265.7 MW of power, or enough for 80,000 homes. Utility San Diego Gas & Electric will buy all of the power from the project, and the farm is owned and will be operated by Silver Ridge Power (previously called AES Solar).

Google is supporting clean energy in a variety of ways. The search engine giant wants to increase the amount of clean power that runs its data centers, but these clean energy projects are not always in the right places at the right times to directly power a Google data center. So Google invests in clean energy farms like Mount Signal Solar, in a way to get these on the grid. But solar farm investors also make money off of their investments, so Google says this is a way to make a financial gain, as well, as help their commitment to clean power. Google also has sustainability goals to reduce its carbon footprint.

]]>It was a project that took five years to fight off critics and secure regulatory permits. But now the Sunrise Powerlink — a transmission line to ferry clean power like solar and wind from California’s desert to its southern coastal region — is done and live, according to its owner San Diego Gas & Electric on Monday.

The nearly $1.9 billion project erected giant towers and built both above ground and underground cables that now run over 110 miles from Imperial Valley to San Diego’s territory. The project required 28,000 flight hours from helicopters to complete nearly 75 percent of the towers along the way (see video). The project uses both 500-kilovolt and 230-kilovolt lines, and it will initially be able to carry up to 800 MW of electricity (eventually the transmission rate should hit 1,000 MW).

San Diego Gas & Electric plans to use the Sunrise Powerlink to transport wind and solar power, such as the eight projects totaling more than 1,000 MW that are set to rise in Imperial County, the company said.

The project was a hard-won victory for the utility, which faced critics who were worried about the project’s environmental impact and skeptical that the project would really be used to move renewable energy and not mostly electricity from fossil fuel power plants. Other similar transmission line projects have been tabled and cancelled because of such concerns.

The California Public Utilities Commission approved the project in December 2008 after rejecting a proposal from an administrative law judge to deny the project. The judge argued that the utility didn’t need the transmission line, which would cause significant environmental damage, to meet the state’s renewable energy mandate then. The commission also decided against a proposal from one of its own commissioners that would’ve required San Diego Gas & Electric to put in writing that it would use Sunrise mostly for moving renewable energy.

Clean power highways

Building new transmission lines, or upgrading existing ones, has come to be viewed as a necessity as more power plants are proposed and set to rise from remote regions where there is space to accommodate large-scale projects that could produce renewable energy more cheaply than smaller ones. For California, which has an aggressive goal of getting 33 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, many of the solar farms are materializing in the eastern part of the state, in arid deserts and on former farmland.

Utilities are largely turning to these large power projects to help them meet the state mandate. But the cost of building transmission lines – and the risks involved if the lines are knocked off line by stormy weather or other natural disasters – also has promoted the idea of building solar projects closer to where the electricity will be used.

The utilities commission approved a program in 2010 to require the state’s three largest utilities to hold auctions to buy renewable energy from projects no more than 20 MW in size. But 20MW still requires a big parcel of land, and some renewable energy proponents would like to see more solar equipment installed on commercial and residential rooftops instead. Those projects are more often kilowatt size.

Meanwhile, transmission line developers are looking at using newer technology to build projects that can carry a larger amount of renewable energy and do it more efficiently over long distances. China, which is building a lot of wind and solar farms, is where some of the world’s largest transmission projects are being built.

]]>Nine more utilities, and three large energy vendors, announced support on Thursday for the Green Button project, which enables utility customers to download their energy consumption data with a click of a button and also use that data for energy-saving apps. President Obama plans to visit Ohio State University on Thursday afternoon and co-host an event with the utilities making commitments.

The Green Button initiative was first announced in January with the support of six utilities. While the project clearly has industry support, it was created to meet a call-to-action by the White House to provide consumers with easy-to-understand data about their energy use.

With the additional utilities, close to 30 million households live in the footprint of a utility that will be offering energy data via Green Button.

As I discussed in a conversation with Nick Sinai, White House Senior Advisor, and Alex Laskey, founder of Opower, at the Verge conference last week, Green Button is just a first step to try to liberate energy data and make it useful to consumers. However, it’s currently a somewhat inefficient process — consumers have to download the energy data and then take another step to use it in a third party app — so some utilities are building a sort of more automated next-gen Green Button 2.0 service.

But the first step of Green Button is a big one, and dozens of companies are sending out letters of support for the project including Google, BT, Intel, Verizon, The Climate Group, Johnson Controls, GE Energy, and Kleiner Perkins.

]]>Setting renewable energy mandates for utilities has been the big policy hammer that forces the use of wind, solar and other sources of cleaner power in the U.S. The pressure has intensified in California now that utilities are required to meet at least a 33 percent mandate by 2020.

Utility Pacific Gas and Electric announced this week three power purchase agreements with solar-project developers. The three projects will collectively have 50 MW of generation capacity and will count as part of a 500-MW program in which PG&E will own 250 MW of solar projects and sign contracts to buy power for another 250 MW. The utility got started on the first 50 MW of its own solar projects earlier this year. Before kick-starting this program, PG&E already signed gigawatts’ worth of power purchase agreements for solar, wind and geothermal energy.

The three developers who will supply power to PG&E are Recurrent Energy, Westlands Solar Farms and Fotowatio Renewable Ventures. These companies promise to start delivering electricity around 2013. If they can meet that time line, then PG&E will be able to count the power toward a 2010 mandate that requires 20 percent of renewable electricity in its energy mix. None of the three big utilities in the state has met that goal yet, though they have a three-year grace period to do so.

By the end of 2010, Southern California Edison achieved 19.4 percent, PG&E 17.7 percent and San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) 11.9 percent, according to the California Public Utilities Commission. Not all contracts signed by the utilities before 2010 have become reality. Some developers couldn’t raise the money and had to sell the development rights or get out of the business altogether.

A third of clean power

Solar power tower

Gov. Jerry Brown, elected last November, signed into law the new mandate of 33 percent by 2020 only in April. The move received loud applause from renewable-energy advocates, of course, and set down a new race for utilities to buy more renewable energy.

SDG&E has lagged behind and has been particularly active in announcing renewable energy contracts this year. In fact, the utility said it has signed contracts totaling 1,225 MW since January, a bulk of which will come from solar.

The urgency to add more clean power also has made SDG&E a patron of a new solar technology that previously didn’t attract nearly as much interest from the two other big utilities in the state. The technology uses lenses to concentrate the sunlight onto solar cells to produce electricity. The approach is meant to reduce the amount and cost of expensive solar cells without reducing the amount of power produced by a solar farm. Soitec, one of the technology and project developers to have signed contracts with SDG&E, plans to build a factory in the San Diego area to supply the equipment for the power projects.

SolFocus

More than half of the states have adopted renewable-energy mandates. The regulatory push for clean power is gradually making people more aware of the sources of their electricity. Renewable-energy advocates used to say that average folks didn’t know or care where their electricity came from. This probably is still true for the majority in the country.

At the same time, a growing number of people are pushing for more clean power beyond just supporting renewable-energy mandates for their utilities. The city council of Boulder, Colo., voted this week to put a measure on the November ballot that will ask voters if the city should form its own utility instead of relying on Xcel Energy, which has been a provider for more than a century. Boulder wants more clean power than Xcel can deliver, and it believes the best way to achieve that is to run its own power business.

Although renewable-energy mandates have made utility-scale development the fast-growing segment of the solar business, they are seen by some clean-power proponents as less effective than the policy widely adopted in Europe that requires utilities to buy renewable electricity at premium rates. The policy, often called feed-in tariff, guarantees a return for project developers. In contrast, utilities in the United States typically buy power from the lowest bidders, and that sometimes causes project developers to make lowball offers that they can’t deliver.

How can Google or Microsoft, let alone startups, compete with that? Helping utilities extend those portals’ functionalities, rather than trying to replace them, will be key. And given that the big three utilities are planning to spend more than $5.6 billion on their smart grid efforts over the next decade or so, the roadmaps released last week could be considered about the closest thing to a detailed plan of attack that smart grid companies could ask for. For more details on those rules and other smart grid deployment issues, see my weekly column at GigaOm Pro (subscription required).

]]>How should utilities protect their customers’ energy data, while at the same time letting the tech world access that data to find new ways to save energy and help the grid? On Friday, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) came out with a long-awaited proposed ruling (PDF) on the subject that would impose privacy rules on home devices that use smart meter data and are “locked” into one company’s platform or technology (think how cell phones are locked into a carrier), but leave customer-owned data sources outside of its authority.

Simply put, CPUC’s proposed ruling would require the state’s big three utilities — Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric — to impose tariffs on third parties that want to get at utility customer energy data. It would also require the utilities to add conditions to those tariffs that impose CPUC’s privacy guidelines on the third parties that sign up for them.

That authority, however, would apply specifically to so-called “locked devices” — any system that’s limited to a single provider’s network or technology. The ruling also singles out systems that keep collecting and using data without any active role on the customers’ part, once the customer has given permission to access it.

Companies that run services that fit this bill will have to enroll in the utilities’ tariff programs, CPUC’s ruling states, and the CPUC has given the state’s three big utilities six months to come up with their tariff plans. I’m curious to hear how the smart grid companies that have argued against the commission having authority to tell them what to do will react to that.

Home energy devices that aren’t “locked” and don’t automatically transfer information to a third party fall under a different category. CPUC puts the onus on utilities in that case, saying they’ll have to provide customers with such systems “information concerning the potential uses and abuses of usage data should the customer forward or otherwise provide the data to another entity” — for example, if they switch from one services provider to another.

CPUC’s proposed ruling comes after years of discussion and argument about just how smart meter data should be managed. Because of California’s position as a market trend-setter and early-adopter of smart meters, it could help set guides for how other state commissions and federal regulators approach the subject.

Don’t expect the new ruling to end the arguments between privacy advocates and the startups, telcos and IT giants that want to use that data to deliver in-home energy services, however. That’s because some of the ruling’s new suggestions are likely to displease both sides on the issue — one of them being the idea that tariffs can give the CPUC the right to tell third parties what to do.

But privacy advocates, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology (PDF), have asked the CPUC to force third parties like Google and others to follow more stringent privacy rules. Those rules, in some cases, go beyond those set by authorities like the Federal Trade Commission or state privacy laws, like California’s SB1746.

Indeed, companies from Verizon and AT&T (PDF) on the telecom side to Tendril, Control4 and EnerNOC (PDF) on the smart grid industry side have filed briefs with the commission saying that it lacks the legal authority to tell them what to do. The idea is that the CPUC is a utility commission — not a Verizon, AT&T, Tendril, Control4 or EnerNOC commission.

CPUC doesn’t lay claim to authority over data from devices that lie within customers’ homes and are owned directly by them, by the way, because they don’t depend on utility data. That’s an important subset in the field of home energy management, including everything from energy-specific devices like The Energy Detective and the PowerCost Monitor, home security-plus-energy monitoring systems like iControl and AlertMe, or home broadband and automation systems from telcos like Verizon and AT&T.

Still, with the cost of home-installed energy devices still in the multiple hundreds of dollars, many companies tackling the home energy space are looking to work with smart meter data that’s already been collected by the utility. That should lower the costs of installing in-home energy systems, and thus make them more affordable and more popular.

What about when the smart meter data is considered to belong to the customer, rather than the utility? Indeed, the CPUC has asked the state’s big three utilities to come up with plans to give their customers data available from smart meters in the coming years, and Friday’s ruling set a six-month deadline for all three to come up with pilot projects to test it out.

Home energy management companies argue that the CPUC can’t legally stop those customers from freely sharing their own data — after all, the CPUC doesn’t have authority over homeowners, any more than it has authority over Google. Once again, there’s room for confusion and argument here.

]]>Will your local utility one day go the way of dinosaurs? Well, as more home and business owners install solar panels, wind turbines and other electricity and heat generating equipment, the roles of the utilities will no doubt change. In fact, that shift has already begun.

“We are on a collision course with them and that’s a problem,” said Matt Cheney, CEO of CleanPath Ventures, which finances renewable energy projects, at a recent SolarTech conference in Silicon Valley last week “I would argue that at $2 per watt you will see droves of people exiting the grid and leaving a lot of the cost of the infrastructure to the people who are left.”

Rebates, tax credits and other incentives from federal, state and even utilities themselves have boosted the number of people who can basically run a little power plant on their properties. The rise of leases and power purchase agreements (PPA) also has turned solar service companies and their financing partners into quasi-utilities: the service providers sell the electricity using long term contracts, and they maintain and repair the solar energy systems.

These leases and PPAs entice buyers by promising electric rates that will be lower than what utilities charge. At least that’s the selling point, and consumers will have to read the contracts carefully to make sure they won’t end up paying more than initially anticipated over 15-20 years, a common length of a contract.

“We will be able to generate solar power on your rooftop at the same cost. It will bankrupt every power company, and we will reverse the role by subsidizing power companies because we will still need them to keep the lights on at night,” said Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Materials, an energy efficiency building product and service provider.

So what can utilities do to make up for the loss of revenues? Instead of selling electricity and natural gas around the clock, they could do that part of the time but also devote resources to facilitating the flow of electricity and charge fees accordingly. Utilities control the grid and that responsibility won’t go away any time soon.

For some home and business owners, one of the appeals of owning solar electric systems is that they can sell the electricity they don’t use back to utilities at retail rates and get credits to offset their bills. So even if they don’t need power from utilities at all, and solar power covers all of their energy needs, they still need access to the grid. Utilities will spend money maintaining those interconnections around the clock even if they only make money from selling power part of the time or not at all.

Some utilities already have thought about levying a grid maintenance charge for these solar-owning customers, and at least one tried to implement it and faced a huge outcry from some ratepayers and solar companies that contend the fee would strangle their business. Xcel Energy in Colorado asked for regulatory approval for such a fee in 2009 and then withdrew the proposal. There is no reason utilities shouldn’t propose such a measure, and they might receive more sympathetic regulators down the road if the solar market grows and forces utilities to seek new sources of revenues.

The electric car market promises to provide good profits for utilities, many of which already are investing in projects to see how car charging will impact how they manage power supply and demand. Selling power won’t be the only source of revenues. Earlier this year, the California Public Utilities Commission approved San Diego Gas & Electric’s proposal to license a car charging technology to Juice Technologies.

Electric cars won’t win over the masses if there isn’t a good network of charging stations across the country. So far, it’s up to a handful of companies that have won federal money to build out the network. If charging station business proves lucrative, then utilities also could invest in, or even run them. Energy consumption data from electric car charging also could allow utilities to sell home energy management gadgets and services.

Utilities don’t have to simply sit and watch solar service companies take revenues away from them. They could join the game. These solar service companies need to raise money to finance the installations and maintenance of their network of solar electric equipment, and in the past they have mostly turned to banks for help.

Private utilities could be the financiers, too. The idea certainly has crossed many utilities’ minds, and Pacific Gas and Electric Co in San Francisco, in particular, has acted on it. Last year, the utility’s parent company announced a $60 million plan to finance installations by SolarCity. PG&E then created a $100 million fund to pay for installations sold and managed by SunRun.

Given that energy demand is expected to only grow, it seems unlikely that utilities will die out with the growth of onsite renewable energy generation. If anything, there are ample opportunities for them to shift away from the conventional business model and try new ones.

]]>UPDATED: Utilities are typically the financiers – not the source of – tech innovations. But San Diego Gas & Electric is breaking that mold by proposing to license a mobile charging device for plug-in electric cars to startup Juice Technologies. The technology was initially developed by a college intern project at the utility.

SDG&E has asked the California Public Utilities Commission to approve its licensing agreement with Juice. SDG&E and Juice already have carried out a pilot project to explore the market potential of this technology, and the commission is set to vote on the proposal on Dec. 16.

In the licensing proposal, SDG&E could buy a 4.99 percent stake in Juice. UPDATE: SDG&E also would receive 2 percent of the gross sales of the equipment if Juice’s revenues exceed $500,000. SDG&E would have to allocate 60 percent of the royalties it receives to its ratepayers (probably in a form of a lower bill). SDG&E can assign one of its employees to work with Juice to bring the technology to market, but its ratepayers will only be required to pay for 60 percent of up to 12 hours of the employee’s work with Juice each week.

SDG&E’s technology involves a device that connects to the car’s onboard charger and a “smart socket” that is connected to the grid. The devices will come with wired or wireless communication and authentication software.

The mobile charging equipment will allow car owners to fill up their electric cars anywhere in the utility’s territory and charge the spending to their SDG&E accounts. The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office received a patent application for the technology in February this year, and the patent is still under review.

Utilities have been carrying out projects to suss out the impact of electric cars on their electricity distribution networks. They worry that the grid will buckle under the heavy demand by consumers to charge their cars, particularly if they do so during the time when electricity use already is high, such as in the afternoon, during hot summer days and early evening when people return home and turn on their appliances. The federal government has awarded more than $100 million for the demonstration and deployment of charging equipment around the country.

Juice started Plug Smart in 2007 to enter the electric car charging market. Juice has attracted some big-name investors and partners. In May, energy management hardware maker Belkin said it had made a “significant equity investment” in Juice, though the company didn’t say how much.

In February, General Electric said it would team up with Juice to develop electric car charging equipment and software. GE plans to design and make the charging equipment and use its own communication technologies to connect the hardware with utilities’ metering and communications equipment. Juice would offer the software that creates the web portal for drivers to schedule and track the charging. GE unveiled its charging equipment, called WattStation, in July.

For more research on smart grid check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

]]>The official verdict is out — Pacific Gas & Electric’s smart meter technology has been working properly, but its customer service hasn’t. That’s the conclusion of a state-ordered report released Thursday from independent analysts at the Structure Group, taking on widespread complaints about overcharging and malfunctioning meters in the wake of PG&E’s ongoing smart meter rollout. Whether this report affects the course of a lawsuit against PG&E on the smart meter front, or calls for a moratorium on smart meter deployments from officials in San Francisco, Marin County and elsewhere, remains to be seen.

Thursday’s report, unveiled at a California Public Utilities Commission meeting in San Francisco, closely matched one that PG&E itself delivered in May. As Stacey Wood with Structure Group put it, “We found no systemic issues beyond the specific issues already reported by PG&E.” In fact, out of the 1,378 smart meters tested, all proved reliable at levels “consistent with industry standards” and provided “accurate meter data flow to billing,” she said.

That means that the price increases customers blamed on smart meters are due to other factors, Wood said, including a heat wave that boosted air conditioning use and rate increases over last summer that “were amplified because of the impacts of weather.” In fact, given that some 5 percent of the older mechanical meters being replaced weren’t working properly, it’s possible that customers seeing higher bills after smart meter were installed may have actually been getting under-billed before, she noted.

But PG&E did incorrectly apply new rates in a few cases, and some customers on a low-income rate reduction program saw billing inaccuracies, Wood added. Those problems tied into a general lack of customer support and complaint management on the smart meter front, Wood said.PG&E “provided little communication on the new meters,” and once complaints started to come in, PG&E “did not utilize new information such as interim measurements” from the new smart meters, which could have helped answer customer questions, she said.

Compared to a set of industry best practices, the report discovered “several items of partial or non-compliance, particularly in the areas of complaint troubleshooting and account billing.” That included a too-high tolerance for billing mistakes to be passed out of the system, she said — bills were at first only being checked if they exceeded $1,700, before that trigger was shifted down to a more reasonable $300, she said.

That’s when smart meters were actually being used for billing, she noted — but because PG&E was installing meters faster than it could start using them, manual meter reading continued for an average of 131 days after a new smart meter was installed before it was “utilized from a billing perspective,” she said.

Several CPUC commissioners said they welcomed the validation of PG&E’s smart meter technology, but wanted to see improvement on the customer service side. As Commissioner Dian Grueneich said, “We need to see a rapid response from senior management at PG&E that gives some assurance the utility will be coming to the top of the class on these best management practices.”

CPUC President Michael Peevey singled out PG&E in Thursday’s meeting, saying that it accounted for the vast majority of complaints to the CPUC about smart meters in the state. By comparison, deployments at San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison have yielded almost no complaints, he said.

PG&E’s smart meter rollout also included a major mid-stream shift in technology. While the utility began by deploying electricity meters from Aclara, it later found that up to 5 percent of those meters were performing below expected. PG&E switched to new smart meters made by General Electric and Landis+Gyr and embedded with networking gear from startup Silver Spring Networks — and those meters, Structure’s report found, have been performing within industry guidelines.

PG&E has also beefed up its customer relations to include a dedicated smart meter hotline and walk-in centers in Oakland, Fresno and Bakersfield, the latter city home to customers at the center of the class-action lawsuit against it. Just how Thursday’s report will affect that lawsuit remains to be seen. A Texas state judge ruled earlier this month that a similar customer lawsuit against utility Oncor should be handled by the state’s PUC, rather than in the court system. A PG&E spokesman told me Monday that a California state court judge was awaiting clarity from Thursday’s report before making any potentially similar rulings in PG&E’s case. Whether the court will more heavily weight PG&E’s clean bill of health on smart meter technology, or the findings of less-than-stellar account and customer management, is an open question.

It’s also too soon for Thursday’s report to determine how the CPUC will respond to requests to halt PG&E’s smart meter deployment, commissioner Nancy Ryan said. San Francisco City Attorney Daniel Herrera had asked CPUC for a moratorium on smart meter installation until the release of Thursday’s report addressed overcharging concerns. Utilities in Maryland and Hawaii have seen their smart meter deployment rejected on the grounds that they rely too much on raising customer rates.

Thursday’s CPUC meeting did draw people protesting against smart meters, but not on concerns of overcharging. Rather, a dozen or so people claimed that the electromagnetic radiation being put out by the smart meters has been making them sick, and others cited studies claiming a link between electromagnetic radiation and health risks including cancer.

Fairfax, Calif. officials have cited these health concerns in demanding that PG&E not install smart meters in the city. PG&E contends that smart meters are far less powerful than cellphones and other radio devices. In any case, the Federal Communications Commission has collected a wide array of studies on the health effects from electromagnetic radiation to give guidelines that PG&E must follow in deploying radios in smart meters in neighborhoods, and Peevey said CPUC would defer to the FCC on that matter.

For more research on the smart grid check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

The debate, which could influence smart grid policies across the country, underscores an important difference between the two things Google wants utilities to provide — energy “usage” data versus “pricing information.” Electricity usage is a real thing that can be measured in real time with magnets and wires, either by a smart meter or lots of other devices. Electricity prices, on the other hand, are contrived, during or after the fact, by a convoluted market that has to keep demand and supply perfectly balanced at all times. Delivering pricing data in real time will be challenging for smart meter networks as they’re currently being deployed. So in other words, for utilities, delivering power comes first, figuring out who pays for it (and how much) comes later.

Update: Google has responded to this story, noting that it was not the originator of the CPUC proposal to ask utilities to provide near real-time data to smart meter customers. Rather, Google is one of many parties supporting that proposal which originated from the CPUC last year. At the same time, Google has been a consistent proponent of giving customers access to their energy usage data, says Michael Terrell, Google’s policy counsel.

Most utility customers pay steady, regulated rates, and don’t get to see these complex price fluctuations — at least, not yet. But even getting slightly more complex tiered or time-of-use prices to customers through their smart meters could be problematic for current utility networks, given that most smart meter deployments today aren’t set up to handle that. As Lee Krevat, director of smart grid initiatives at San Diego Gas & Electric, put it in an interview this week, “We didn’t put in an Internet to each meter, or broadband to each meter — and ‘real time’ really implies broadband to give near real time pricing data.”

Most smart meter networks, including those being deployed by California’s big utilities, are lower-bandwidth and designed to be read every 15 minutes or hourly, not in real time. While there are ways to get faster or more current price information to homeowners, Krevat doesn’t see such a network being the best, or most cost-effective, way, to do it.

After all, “The rates exist on our Web site. The rate schedule doesn’t change very often,” he said. “Do you want to spend your bandwidth transmitting something that could be figured out at a customer end point based on their consumption data?”

Or, to put it another way, would utility customers support paying for the ability to see pricing data? The customers are the ones who pay for utilities’ smart meter system upgrades through increased rates. That certainly differentiates the utilities’ incentives from Google, which wants usage and pricing data opened to third party systems like its PowerMeter home energy management platform. Google promises PowerMeter will be free, but building a system that can provide it with data may still cost customers in one way or another.

SDG&E is working with Google’s PowerMeter and has about 125 customers testing it out — but right now they’re using day-old energy usage information, and currently PowerMeter doesn’t deliver any real-time pricing information. Eventually, California’s three big utilities plan to turn on their smart meters’ home area network (HAN) connections, but they’re doing a lot of testing first. Krevat said that’s an important first step in designing a system that’s both cheap and effective — “Understanding the model for how the customer wants to use it is the first step,” he said. “Then you can decide the technical solution.”

Ted Reguly, SDG&E’s smart meter program director, said customers mainly want some kind of current bill calculation, as well as some kind of pre-set alert when that monthly tally gets too high. Someday people will want to hook up smart appliances and other in-home energy controls to the smart meter via the HAN. But as SDG&E noted in its comments to the CPUC filed in March, “the Smart Meter system as currently designed requires more than HAN to provide customer access to near real time information on prices.”

Beyond these issues, it will be important to clarify what Google means by “pricing information,” Reguly said. Does Google mean the flat rates homeowners are scheduled to pay, or the actual prices that they end up paying after the bill is finalized? “You might think the cost of electricity is X, but it’s really Y because of bill settlement two or three days later,” he said — and getting the more accurate figures to customers in real time would require utilities to completely overhaul the batch processing-based back-office billing systems they now use.

Andy Tang, PG&E’s smart grid chief, said during a recent energy symposium in Berkeley, Calif. that asking utilities to replace their batch-based systems with real-time systems was “impossible” in such a short timeframe, at least not at costs that regulators would be willing to pass on to customers. Tang also expressed some frustration with Google’s push for deadlines for delivering real-time pricing, given that the federal government is still working on standards for all the smart grid systems to make this possible, he said. As PG&E wrote in its comments to the CPUC, “No amount of cajoling or wishing by one vendor or another that it happen by an arbitrary date can change the need for development of such uniform standards.”

Emerging Standards

Just how those standards will emerge remains to be seen. ZigBee, the wireless technology that’s taken a lead in smart meter-HAN connectivity, is working on a second iteration of its Smart Energy Profile specification for energy data that will include some pricing information, Reguly said. For commercial and industrial customers, open demand response technologies like Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s OpenADR or EnerNOC’s PowerTalk, are expected to embed price signals as part of an automated system to turn down devices to help utilities reduce peak loads.

All three California utilities have asked CPUC to avoid any hard deadlines in favor of looser policy guidance. But the issue COULD comE to every state. The Federal Communications Commission’s new U.S. National Broadband Plan includes some strong words for state utility regulators to encourage utilities to deliver real time pricing data to consumers.
To wit:

“States should require electric utilities to provide consumers access to, and control of, their own digital energy information, including real-time information from smart meters and historical consumption, price and bill data over the Internet. If states fail to develop reasonable policies over the next 18 months, Congress should consider national legislation to cover consumer privacy and the accessibility of energy data.”

Just how the CPUC decides to take up Google’s its deadline — as well as how it comes to define pricing data in the process — will be closely watched topics in the smart grid industry. Stay tuned for more details later this week.